What explains the success of criminal prosecutions against former Latin American officials accused of human rights violations? Why did some judiciaries evolve from unresponsive bureaucracies into protectors of victim rights? Using a theory of judicial action inspired by sociological institutionalism, this book argues that this was the result of deep transformations in the legal preferences of judges and prosecutors. Judicial actors discarded long-standing positivist legal criteria, historically protective of conservative interests, and embraced doctrines grounded in international human rights law, which made possible innovative readings of constitutions and criminal codes. Litigants were responsible for this shift in legal visions by activating informal mechanisms of ideational change and providing the skills necessary to deal with complex and unusual cases. Through an in-depth exploration of the interactions between judges, prosecutors and human rights lawyers in three countries, the book asks how changing ideas about the law and standards of adjudication condition the exercise of judicial power.

This book presents a political understanding of socio-economic rights by contextualising constitution-makers' and judges' decision-making in terms of Ireland's rich history of people's struggles for justice 'from below' between 1848 and the present. Its theoretical framework incorporates critical legal studies and world-systems analysis. It performs a critical discourse analysis of constitution-making processes in 1922 and 1937 as well as subsequent property, trade union, family and welfare rights case law. It traces the marginalisation of socio-economic rights in Ireland from specific, local and institutional factors to the contested balance of core-peripheral and social relations in the world-system. The book demonstrates the endurance of ideological understandings of state constitutionalism as inherently neutral between interests. Unemployed marches, housing protestors and striking workers, however, provided important challenges and oppositional discourses. Recognising these enduring forms of power and ideology is vital if we are to assess critically the possibilities and limits of contesting socio-economic rights today.

Citizenship 2.0 focuses on an important yet overlooked dimension of globalization: the steady rise in the legitimacy and prevalence of dual citizenship. Demand for dual citizenship is particularly high in Latin America and Eastern Europe, where more than three million people have obtained a second citizenship from EU countries or the United States. Most citizenship seekers acquire EU citizenship by drawing on their ancestry or ethnic origin; others secure U.S. citizenship for their children by strategically planning their place of birth. Their aim is to gain a second, compensatory citizenship that would provide superior travel freedom, broader opportunities, an insurance policy, and even a status symbol. Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, Yossi Harpaz analyzes three cases: Israelis who acquire citizenship from European-origin countries such as Germany or Poland; Hungarian-speaking citizens of Serbia who obtain a second citizenship from Hungary (and, through it, EU citizenship); and Mexicans who give birth in the United States to secure American citizenship for their children. Harpaz reveals the growth of instrumental attitudes toward citizenship: individuals worldwide increasingly view nationality as rank within a global hierarchy rather than as a sanctified symbol of a unique national identity. Citizenship 2.0 sheds light on a fascinating phenomenon that is expected to have a growing impact on national identity, immigration, and economic inequality.

Since the early 1990s, politicians, policymakers, the media and academics have increasingly focused on religion, noting the significant increase in the number of cases involving religion. As a result, law and religion has become a specific area of study. The work of Professor Norman Doe at Cardiff University has served as a catalyst for this change, especially through the creation of the LLM in Canon Law in 1991 (the first degree of its type since the time of the Reformation) and the Centre for Law and Religion in 1998 (the first of its kind in the UK). Published to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the LLM in Canon Law and to pay tribute to Professor Doe's achievements so far, this volume reflects upon the interdisciplinary development of law and religion.

The federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which recently turned 50, has been hailed as the primary means by which US citizens can know about how their governors operate in a democratic republic. Recently, however, it has been criticized as ineffective because it is cumbersome and full of loopholes. This book examines the role and effectiveness of the FOIA, comparing the FOIA world with the pre-FOIA world, rating its effectiveness compared to other access laws internationally, examining ways in which it can be improved, and questioning whether it should be dismantled and replaced. This book was originally published as a special issue of Communication Law and Policy.

To have a nationality is a human right. But between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, virtually every country in the world adopted laws that stripped citizenship from women who married foreign men. Despite the resulting hardships and even statelessness experienced by married women, it took until 1957 for the international community to condemn the practice, with the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Nationality of Married Women. Citizenship, Alienage, and the Modern Constitutional State tells the important yet neglected story of marital denaturalization from a comparative perspective. Examining denaturalization laws and their impact on women around the world, with a focus on Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States, it advances a concept of citizenship as profoundly personal and existential. In doing so, it sheds light on both a specific chapter of legal history and the theory of citizenship in general.

Social justice and human rights movements are entering a new phase. Social media, artificial intelligence, and digital forensics are reshaping advocacy and compliance. Technicians, lawmakers, and advocates, sometimes in collaboration with the private sector, have increasingly gravitated toward the possibilities and dangers inherent in the nonhuman. #HumanRights examines how new technologies interact with older models of rights claiming and communication, influencing and reshaping the modern-day pursuit of justice. Ronald Niezen argues that the impacts of information technologies on human rights are not found through an exclusive focus on sophisticated, expert-driven forms of data management but in considering how these technologies are interacting with other, "traditional" forms of media to produce new avenues of expression, public sympathy, redress of grievances, and sources of the self. Niezen considers various ways that the pursuit of justice is happening via new technologies, including crowdsourcing, social media-facilitated mobilizations (and enclosures), WhatsApp activist networks, and the selective attention of Google's search engine algorithm. He uncovers how emerging technologies of data management and social media influence the ways that human rights claimants and their allies pursue justice, and the "new victimology" that prioritizes and represents strategic lives and types of violence over others. #HumanRights paints a striking and important panoramic picture of the contest between authoritarianism and the new tools by which people attempt to leverage human rights and bring the powerful to account.

Updated in a new 9th edition, this casebook explores civil liberty problems through a study of leading judicial decisions. It offers a reasonable sample of cases across a broad spectrum of rights and liberties. This book introduces groups of featured cases with in-depth commentaries that set the specific historical-legal context of which they are a part, allowing readers to examine significant portions of court opinions, including major arguments from majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions.

Can torture be justified in exceptional circumstances? In this timely work, Michelle Farrell asks how and why this question has become such a central debate. She argues that the ticking bomb scenario is a fiction which blinds us to the reality of torture and investigates what it is that that scenario fails to represent. Farrell aims to reframe how we think about torture, and critically reflects on the historical and contemporary approaches to its use in exceptional situations. She demonstrates how torture, from its use in Algeria to the 'War on Terror', has been misrepresented, and appraises the legalist, extra-legalist and absolutist assessments of exception to the torture prohibition. Employing Giorgio Agamben's theory of the state of exception as a foil, Farrell deconstructs these approaches and goes on to propose her own theory of exceptional torture.

International politics has become increasingly legalized over the past fifty years, restructuring the way states interact with each other, international institutions, and their own constituents. The international legalization of human rights now makes it possible for individuals to take human rights claims against their governments at international courts such as the European and Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. This book brings together theories from international law, human rights and international relations to explain the increasingly important phenomenon of states' compliance with human rights tribunals' rulings. It argues that this is an inherently domestic affair. It posits three overarching questions: why do states comply with human rights tribunals' rulings? How does the compliance process unfold and what are the domestic political considerations around compliance? What effect does compliance have on the protection of human rights? The book answers these through a combination of quantitative analyses and in-depth case studies from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Portugal, Russia and the United Kingdom.

Civil Rights in American Law, History, and Politics charts the ambiguous and contested meanings of civil rights in law and culture and confronts important questions about race in contemporary America. How important is civil rights in America's story of possibility and change? How has it transformed the very meaning of citizenship and identity in American culture? Why does the subject of race continue to haunt the American imagination and play such a large role in political and legal debates? Do affirmative action and multiculturalism promise a way out of racial polarization, or do they sharpen and deepen it? Are there new and better ways to frame our commitment to equal justice? This book brings together the work of five distinguished scholars to critically assess the place of civil rights in the American story. It offers different ways of talking about civil rights and frames through which we can address issues of civil rights in the future.

The UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights obliges state parties to prohibit any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination or violence. This book traces the origins of this provision and proposes an actus reus for this offence. The question of whether hateful incitement is a prohibition per se or also encapsulates a fundamental 'right to be protected against incitement' is extensively debated. Also addressed is the question of how to judge incitement. Is mens rea required to convict someone of advocating hatred, and if so, for what degree of intent? This analysis also includes the paramount question if and to what extent content and/or context factors ought to be decisive. The author extensively engages with comparative domestic law and compares the workings of the UN Human Rights Committee with those of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the European Court of Human Rights.

Both New Zealand and the United Kingdom challenge assumptions about how a bill of rights functions. Their parliamentary bills of rights constrain judicial review and also look to parliament to play a rights-protecting role. This arises from the requirement to inform parliament if legislative bills are not compatible with rights. But are these bills of rights operating in this proactive manner? Are governments encountering significantly stronger pressures to ensure legislation complies with rights? Are these bills of rights resulting in more reasoned deliberations in parliament about the justification of legislation from a rights perspective? Through extensive interviews with public officials and analysis of parliamentary debates where questions of compliance with rights arise (prisoner voting, parole and sentencing policy, counter-terrorism legislation, and same-sex marriage), this book argues that a serious gap exists between the promise of these bills of rights and the institutional variables that influence how these parliaments function.

The embrace of socio-economic rights in South Africa has featured prominently in scholarship on constitution making, legal jurisprudence and social mobilisation. But the development has attracted critics who claim that this turn to rights has not generated social transformation in practice. This book sets out to assess one part of the puzzle and asks what has been the role and impact of socio-economic strategies used by civil society actors. Focusing on a range of socio-economic rights and national trends in law and political economy, the book's authors show how socio-economic rights have influenced the development of civil society discourse and action. The evidence suggests that some strategies have achieved material and political impact but this is conditional on the nature of the claim, degree of mobilisation and alliance building, and underlying constraints.

We live in an interconnected world in which expressive and religious cultures increasingly commingle and collide. In a globalized and digitized era, we need to better understand the relationship between the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and international borders. This book focuses on the exercise and protection of cross-border and beyond-border expressive and religious liberties, and on the First Amendment's relationship to the world beyond US shores. It reveals a cosmopolitan First Amendment that protects cross-border conversation, facilitates the global spread of democratic principles, recognizes expressive and religious liberties regardless of location, is influential across the world, and encourages respectful engagement with the liberty regimes of other nations. The Cosmopolitan First Amendment is the product of historical, social, political, technological and legal developments. It examines the First Amendment's relationship to foreign travel, immigration, cross-border communication and association, religious activities that traverse international borders, conflicts among foreign and US speech and religious liberty models, and the conduct of international affairs and diplomacy.

How to address the human rights violations of previous regimes and past periods of conflict is one of the most pressing questions facing governments and policy makers today. New democracies and states in the fragile post-conflict peace-settlement phase are confronted by the need to make crucial decisions about whether to hold perpetrators of human rights violations accountable for their actions and, if so, how to best achieve that end. This is the first book to examine the ways in which states and societies in the Asia-Pacific region have navigated these difficult waters. Drawing together several of the world's leading experts on transitional justice with Asia-Pacific regional and country specialists it provides an overview of the processes and practices of transitional justice in the region as well as detailed analysis of the cases of Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Aceh, Indonesia, South Korea, the Solomon Islands and East Timor.

This book studies how victims of human rights violations in Latin America, their families, and their advocates work to overcome entrenched impunity and seek legal justice. Their struggles show that legal justice is a multifaceted process, the overarching purpose of which is to restore human dignity and prevent further violence. Uncovering, revealing, and proving the truth are essential elements of legal justice, and are also powerful tools to activate the process. When faced with stubborn impunity at home, victims, families, and advocates can carry on their work for legal justice by bringing cases in courts in other countries or in the inter-American human rights system. These extra-territorial courts can jump-start the process of legal justice at home. Seeking Human Rights Justice in Latin America examines the political and legal struggle through the lens of the human story at the heart of these cases.

This collection of original essays, from both established scholars and newcomers, takes up a recent debate in philosophy, sociology, and disability studies on whether disability is intrinsically a harm that lowers a person's quality of life. While this is a new question in disability scholarship, it also touches on one of the oldest philosophical questions: what is the good human life? Historically, philosophers have not been interested in the topic of disability, and when they are it is usually only in relation to questions such as euthanasia, abortion, or the moral status of disabled people. Consequently disability has been either ignored by moral and political philosophers or simply equated with a bad human life, a life not worth living. This collection takes up the challenge that disability poses to basic questions of political philosophy and bioethics, among others, by focusing on fundamental issues and practical implications of the relationship between disability and the good human life.

Particularly in the context of internal conflicts, international law is frequently unable to create and sustain frameworks for peace in Africa. In Peacebuilding in the African Union, Abou Jeng explores the factors which have prevented such steps forward in the interaction between the international legal order and postcolonial Africa. In the first work of its kind, Jeng considers whether these limitations necessitate recasting the existing conceptual structure and whether the Constitutive Act of the African Union provides exactly this opportunity through its integrated peace and security framework. Through the case studies of Burundi and Somalia, Jeng examines the structures and philosophy of the African Union and assesses the capacity of its practices in peacemaking. In so doing, this book will be of great practical value to scholars and legal practitioners alike.

An 'implementation crisis' has been identified in the enforcement of rulings of UN and regional human rights bodies, and fundamental but crucial questions remain unanswered: what exactly does it mean to implement and comply with international and regional human rights decisions, and what factors influence whether a state implements and complies or not? Much more is now known about the work of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, but a gap still exists in the literature on the implementation of the findings of the Commission. This book draws upon the data and evaluation from a four-year research project, analysing the range of pronouncements of the African Commission, including its decisions on individual communications, provisional measures, resolutions, and promotional and protective mission reports. It investigates the extent to which states implement these findings and examines how that implementation is monitored by others.

Archbishop Stephen Langton hoped with Magna Carta to realise an Old Testament, covenantal kingship in England. At the Charter's 800th anniversary, distinguished jurists, theologians and historians from five faith-traditions and three continents ask how Magna Carta's biblical foundations have mattered and still matter now. A Lord Chief Justice, a Chief Rabbi, a Grand Mufti of Egypt, specialists in eight centuries of law, scholars and advocates committed to the rule of law and to the place of religion in public life all come together in this testimony to Magna Carta's iconic power. We follow the Charter's story in the religious life of the UK, America and now Continental Europe, and reflections on religio-legal traditions far from the Common Law enrich the story. Magna Carta, Religion and the Rule of Law invites all religions to ask what contribution they themselves should make to the rule of law in today's secular, democratic polities.

This collection of seminal essays by David Little addresses the subject of human rights in relation to the historical settings in which its language was drafted and adopted. Featuring five original essays, Little articulates his long-standing view that fascist practices before and during World War II vivified the wrongfulness of deliberately inflicting severe pain, injury, and destruction for self-serving purposes and that the human rights corpus, developed in response, was designed to outlaw all practices of arbitrary force. Drawing on the natural rights tradition, the book contends that while there must be an accountable human rights standard, it should nevertheless guarantee wide latitude for the expression and practice of religious and other conscientious beliefs, consistent with outlawing arbitrary force. This book further details the theoretical grounds of the relationship between religion and human rights, and concludes with essays on U.S. policy and the restraint of force in regard to terrorism and to cases like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. With a foreword by John Kelsey, this book stands as a capstone of the work of this influential writer on religion, philosophy, and law.

Many of us take for granted the idea that the right to religious freedom should be protected in a free, democratic polity. However, this book challenges whether the protection and privilege of religious belief and identity should be prioritized over any other right. By studying the effects of constitutional promises of religious freedom and establishment clauses, Frank B. Cross sets the stage for a set of empirical questions that examines the consequences of such protections. Although the case for broader protection is often made as a theoretical matter, constitutions generally protect freedom of religion. Allowing people full choice in holding religious beliefs or freedom of conscience is central to their autonomy. Freedom of religion is thus potentially a very valuable aspect of society, at least so long as it respects the freedom of individuals to be irreligious. This book tests these associations and finds that constitutions provide national religious protection, especially when the legal system is more sophisticated.